Taylor Mead

Offbeat actor and poet who played a fragile Tarzan in an Andy Warhol movie

Saturday June 08 2013, 1.01am, The Times

Taylor Mead, actor

Saturday June 08 2013, 1.01am, The Times

Taylor Mead’s bottom was a legend in the film world. The 1964 film Taylor Mead’s Ass was simply footage of his naked buttocks, for over an hour, recorded for posterity by Andy Warhol.

He was one of the regulars in Warhol’s films. Pigeon-chested, slight of build, with rather lopsided, bemused features, he would have been unlikely casting as Tarzan in a film made by anyone but Warhol. His appearance in Warhol’s Tarzan and Jane Regained . . . Sort Of (1963) led to a complaint that people did not want to see films “focusing on Taylor Mead’s ass”.

Mead, who had been dubbed by J. Hoberman in The Village Voice as “the first underground movie star”, responded by saying that no such film existed in